ENTERTAINMENTS; Moondoggie Needs An Intervention

By David Carr

Published: June 3, 2007

To surf, a small verb lacking filigree or urgency, belongs to magical realism as much as to sport. Hawaiians, who were perhaps the first surfers, prayed for good conditions and venerated those who could truly harness a wave. Mark Twain wrote rapturously of his first encounter with surfing, watching a native Hawaiian ''face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!'' When people started to explore the Internet, which promised endless possibility to anyone with a computer, they called it surfing.

The magic and the promise aren't quite so sunny in the newest series from HBO, ''John From Cincinnati,'' which makes its debut on June 10, right after the final episode of ''The Sopranos.'' Despite being set in the Southern California surfing scene, the show is less about mastering the waves than surviving amid them. The first episode is filled with conflicts, scams, addiction and corruption, all familiar concerns to anyone who knows the work of its executive producer, David Milch, who created ''NYPD Blue'' and, more recently, ''Deadwood.'' And there are the usual compelling sidebars and memorable characters -- a lawyer named Dickstein, a retired cop who looks after birds and humans, gangsters in beach casual.

The surfers in ''John From Cincinnati'' are an obsessive, emotionally gimped bunch whose only good choices seem to be made in the water. The rest of life baffles them. The family of famous, world-class surfers at the heart of the show, the Yosts, seems to have a gene for dysfunction -- along with one for truly heavy surfing skills -- that it passes down from generation to generation. The first three episodes suggest that the show will echo the weave of sacred and profane that made ''Deadwood'' so hard to look away from. In that series, set in a gold-rush-era Deadwood, in the Dakota Territory, an ad hoc tribe formed around the pursuit of gold and sorted itself over three seasons through power plays, intrigue and, when those didn't do the trick, gunfire and a trip to an omnivorous hog pen. The people in ''John'' are at the end of that Western expansion, at the final frontier where the land meets the water in this instance, the compromised and polluted ocean waters off the grubby border town of present-day Imperial Beach. And where Butchie Yost (Brian Van Holt), who once dominated the waves, is now a loser slamming dope in a decrepit motel, his former greatness serving as little more than an indictment of his current circumstances.

Near the end of the first episode, there's a moment when the land recedes as Butchie and his son, Shaun (Greyson Fletcher), paddle out with John (Austin Nichols), who is probably not from Cincinnati. He was found wandering along the border with Mexico, but he seems to come from points beyond. He is something of an idiot, prone to simply repeating what is said to him. But as the waves and the Killers swell on the soundtrack (''I got soul, but I'm not a soldier''), John shows that he's a physical savant as well as an idiot. He duck-dives through the incoming surf on the way out, then grabs a wave and makes sure-footed pumps up to the crest before leaving its grasp against a brilliant setting sun, only to land gracefully and begin riding anew. A sense of possibility, of the limitless horizon you can only see from the top of the wave, gives the dark proceedings a hopeful lilt.

Milch is an intellectual descendant of Robert Penn Warren's; he lectured in English literature at Yale, from which he had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude. He has also played the horses and conducted extensive personal research into illicit pharmacology -- he has talked repeatedly about his experiences as an addict. All of Milch's endeavors reflect waves in one form or another, and are deepened by the expansive, complicated life that created them. You can see where he might find similarities -- and the stuff of drama -- in the pursuits of getting high and catching a wave. ''I've learned making this show that the essence of surfing is so compelling that it makes other parts of life pale by comparison,'' Milch told me in April. ''You end up chasing that first experience, a devil's bargain that is all part of the wave.''

Few who watch ''John From Cincinnati'' will find themselves humming a Beach Boys song, but then surfing has a muddled cultural legacy. The movies ''Big Wednesday'' (1978) and ''Point Break'' (1991) earned some street cred among hard-core surfers for getting at least part of it right. Yet the '60s TV show ''Gidget,'' with its cheesy, low-tech glories depicting Sally Field on a surfboard, is also solidly lodged in the pop culture. And no one is going to mistake ''John'' for the epic, sensual tableau of ''Blue Crush,'' a 2002 movie awash with bikinis and wave-borne catfights: verisimilitude is important to Milch's show. A host of world-conquering surfers -- among them Brock Little,